New Delhi:
The next time you are rushing for an important appointment and can’t afford to get caught in a jam, make sure you call the traffic police helpline to know which roads to avoid. In a novel initiative, the cops have set up an interactive map at the helpline, where officials will collect information about all the congested road stretches from field officers and plot it on the city map.
As part of the new facility, a city map with the entire road network has been displayed on a white board using an overhead projector. Officials manning the helpline will routinely call field officers from the traffic police and also take inputs from the general public to identify roads where traffic is moving slowly, or where there is a jam. This information will be marked on the map and officials will keep updating it by erasing the areas where jams have cleared out and marking new ones.
This information can be accessed by traffic police officials who can, by simply taking a look at the map, get an idea of the traffic congestion levels in the city.
This is expected to reduce the jams as speedy remedial action will be taken to sort out the situation. For motorists at large, the facility will work as an advisory informing them about the roads where average speed of traffic is slow. "Anyone from the public can call the helpline number 23010101 and get information about the travel time through a particular stretch and decide their route accordingly," said S N Shrivastava, joint commissioner of police (traffic).
The interactive map has been put up at the Teen Murti Traffic Lines and is in the stage of final testing. The facility is expected to be in use from the coming week. Before the Commonwealth Games, the traffic police will be setting up a state-of-the-art traffic management centre for the city, where similar information will be plotted in layers on a digitized map. But till the centre comes up - Delhi Police has floated a global tender and are still in the process of tendering — this interactive map attached to the helpline, which is expected to serve the same purpose.
